Down ready set...Hut One...Hut Two...Hike! And thus the epoch of National Football League season commences while on a perhaps even larger scale, the collegiate gridiron calendar resumes in earnest with the playing of a game that incorporates all that is good, ugly and evil about the American landscape.

Doubt if you shall that this complicated game derives from slavery and war and many of the names of its teams on both surfaces profit from such an inhumane culture and then you too have been transformed into one of its cult followers.

Before the final list of cuts, unkind releases and trades have been brokered, the next contingent of football traders were in preparation as the collegiate teams postured amid millions in bowl filled stadiums, thus auditioning for their chance to play on Sundays.

Masterly marketed and frothily controlled by Whites, it is a passion for the poor who may find an old jersey at Goodwill, the middle class who may be fortunate enough to purchase an occasional 50-yard line seat or the affluent who own sky boxes and mingle with its elite.

Needless to say that to some degree I too, am inspired by the shiny helmets and the colorful tights decorating the natural and artificial manicured turfs to an extent that compels me to watch and listen.

Here in Southern California, we root for the Raiders from afar after they abandoned us some 14 years ago and we succumb to the network and cable games that table the schedule.

Of course “we” or shall I say USC has a team that may be much better than any professional team one could imagine and UCLA with its fifth year Black coach Karl Dorrell will provide us with enough suspense an story lines to fill our football appetite.

The sports books and bookie joints will all profit on this ill of football trafficking and those in fantasy land will see their emotions drawn even closer to a game that begins as tic tac toe X and O and conclude with their hatred for a human they’ve never known.

The fall from grace of Michael Vick, the change of face of the winners and losers.

Tony Dungy and his Super Bowl winning Colts being relegated to a meager side bar as the season approaches.

The networks whose billions spent have allowed for them some sort of ownership, their analyst whose predictions which change as the wind blows.

It’s beautifully fascinating, randomly predictable and we are all suckers and not ashamed of it.